Trigger Warning

Gun control won’t protect me because it excludes me.

Sarah Rupp
Tue, Jun 28 2016

We used to shoot up bottles in the abandoned mall when I was a teenager. Kind of dystopic, but in an endearing way. We never killed anything. We killed the Hot Topic sign, we killed the cherubs on the mossy fountain. I don’t give a shit about gun control, just like I don’t give two shits about voting, GMOs, or recycling. Liberal civil society causes give me the creeps. I’m a bad person, a Generation Y (say it always in a whine, like, why?) I am southern, but my accent has softened. My mom thinks I willed it away, along with my blue eyes. Her dad, by the way, shot a man in a duel because that man had accidentally killed his favorite hunting dog. I was born in the last hacking cough of capitalism, into the furnace of the Anthropocene.

I’ve had guns pulled on me twice. Once was in high school, when I witnessed a drug deal in the suburbs. The other time was when I got robbed while feeding raccoons stolen Twinkies behind Laney College. The guy I lost my virginity to pistol-whipped an undercover cop in a drug deal. He might still be in jail, which sucks even though he sucked. When I was deported from Canada, I was escorted through airport security by two Mounties carrying rifles. I’ve been threatened with guns way more than I even know. I googled myself once and a thread came up on Storm Front, a white supremacist forum, and they were talking about shooting me. And do you remember the DC sniper? I’m from there and in elementary school we weren’t allowed outside for recess because they didn’t want us to get shot.

I have suicidal tendencies. I do DBT for it. I take Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Klonopin, and Adderall every day, like a cyborg. I went to a psych ward, once. My suicide note was about how existentially devastating the idea of having to work every day until I die was for me. How I was lonely. How I was sorry. How I was done.

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